
17. Juli 17 -
Di.
18. Juli 17
Ort
ZeM – Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften
Friedrich-Ebert-Straße 4
14467 Potsdam
Extras, bit-players, and historical consultants in mediahistory
The scientific attention to actors in film is double-barreled. When Richard Dyer published his monograph “Stars” in 1979, he provoked an unabated academic interest in prominent film actors. Ever since, the so-called “Star Studies” became a recognized field of research in media sciences and can, today, refer to a vast number of analyses of celebrity images as well as to research on the structural core of celebrity systems. In contrast to the amount of studies focusing on the upper sphere of the actors’ hierarchy, only few academic contributions exist to extras and bit-players in film – although those constitute the major part of people working in front of the film camera. This is largely, due to the insufficient documentation of extras’ activity in film business. Extras and bit-players “represent the nameless rank-and-file labor force that the capitalist system demands, film researchers are left with no real database from which to proceed” (Clark 1995, 2).
Aside from the by now classic discussion about the crowd in films (e.g. Lotte H. Eisner, Siegfried Krakauer and Sergei Eisenstein), recent research reveals, that the study of extras can provide interesting results in spite of the challenging source situation (see the work of Danae Clark, Anthony Slide, John Caughie and Kerry Segrave). But these works are only dealing with the extras in the Hollywood Studio system. Regarding the German film production, research on extras in film is scarce. In fact, it is Tobias Nagel (2004, 2009, 2012) who provided first comprehensive results about – among others – black bit-part players in the cinema of the Weimar Republic.
Part of the workshop will include presentations on the use of extras in Babelsberg, the center of German film production for many decades. To balance and enrich this local orientation, we would like contributions focusing on extras and their treatment in other countries, both in the context of the studio system and/or independent production and including the treatment of historical consultants.
The first day will include a Q&A session with a casting agent for extras and bit-players. A guided tour of the Film Museum Potsdam is also planned.
Both evenings will include screenings of films about extras and bit-players.
Guest auditors, welcome!
If you wish to be a guest auditor at the workshop, please register here: , and be so kind, as to provide a short statement of your motivation and some information on your institutional affiliation.
For registered guests the studio tour, the guided tour through the Film museum and the
screenings are free. Please note, that as guest auditor you have to pay for the lunches and
the dinners by yourself.
KOORDINATION
Anna Luise Kiss, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF
Personen
Anna Luise Kiss has held a position as a research and teaching assistant in the field of media history at the Film University Babelsberg since November 2012 and has started work on her PhD about “Non-actors in feature films”. In November 2014 she published her first academic anthology on the DEFA director Herrmann Zschoche. Together with the cinematographer Dieter Chill she’ll present in December 2016 their research on the still photographer Waltraut Pathenheimer in a book (Ch. Verlag) and an exhibition in the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies.